Werner Herzog, the world's most dangerous director, makes his first studio film in two decades

Let the ordeal begin! On location in the Thai jungle, Herzog cues another harrowing scene.

Directors like to think of themselves as adventurers: taking big-budget risks, leading actors and technicians into the artistic unknown, often shooting in faraway locations. But no filmmaker can match Werner Herzog for inspiring recklessness. The German director's movie sojourns take him not just to remote corners of Peru, Alaska and Thailand but also to the uncharted interior of man's highest, most lunatic dreams. In a 46-year career of great fiction films (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Heart of Glass; Nosferatu; Fitzcarraldo) and in a string of amazing, hallucinatory documentaries (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, The White Diamond, Grizzly Man), Herzog,...